New feature: Mailboxes

You know how when you get a nonprofit’s email newsletter, or a donation appeal from a campaign, that replying to the email blast never goes to anyone? Many organizations actually send the emails from an email address like “noreply@myorganization.com” just to make it super clear they don’t want you to reply.

We’ve all just gotten used to it, but it’s ridiculous, if you think about it. As organizers, you put all this effort into reaching out to people, and then the one time when they actually want to talk to you, you completely ignore them?!

All those emails you send asking for money? What if someone has a question? What if they have a problem donating? What if they want to give you more money than can fit on their credit card? What if it’s Taylor Swift and she wants to write a breakup song about you?

Ignoring your community after you blast them makes no sense. So why does everyone do it?

Because they don’t have time to sort through all the responses. NationBuilder has suggestion boxes to help gather feedback on a large scale, but what about the replies? What if you could automatically route all those emails to exactly the right person? The donor gets sent to the fundraising coordinator, the volunteer gets sent to the volunteer coordinator, and the candidate's husband gets sent to the intern.

Surprisingly, as far as I know, there’s never been an email blasting tool with inbound email management. Until now!

Now any broadcaster can receive email, as well as send it. You can set a point person, tags and a followup automatically to make sure when the broadcaster receives an email, the sender's point person knows – so the best person responds and no one is inundated with email. It works the same way when someone sends a text message, signs a petition, donates, or even mentions you on Twitter.

This isn’t meant for your personal email, it’s meant for emails sent to your organization like info@, jobs@, volunteer@ type email addresses. We’ve been using it ourselves at NationBuilder for several months now, tweaking and preparing it for release. For example, when you email support, you are automatically set for “support” followup and your point person is notified. If it’s a more complicated tech problem, we can change the followup to “support-tech,” etc. Then when we respond, it’s automatically logged in the activity stream so the next time you interact with us, we know the history.

And the best part? This is all included in the email addon. Yep, unlimited email mailboxes, no additional charge.